Perhaps one the greatest individual theologians of the Christian East, Gregory Palamas, never presented a systematic doctrine of divinization. His contribution to the topic, however, has been enormous. Regardless of the controversial debates he engaged in with his theological opponents and the resulting reactionary nature of his theology, Gregory is highly esteemed as the teacher of divinity and a man of prayer. He is still frequently castigated in Western Christianity, I truly believe, because most people find him quite difficult to comprehend and because they have failed to open their hearts and minds to his theology. Of course Western Christianity hasn’t been very open to the idea of Theosis either.

Gregory, building on the teachings and spirituality of the fathers, formed his ideas about deification on these three main premises: (1) the creation of  humans in the image and after the likeness of God; (2) the incarnation of God in the Person of Jesus, His Word and Son; and (3) the strength of the human being’s communion with God in the Holy Spirit.

Gregory often reminds us of the fact that even though humans were created in God’s image, they are the image in a sort of indistinct way, whereas Christ is an identical image. Humans, having their origin in God, in their existence mirror God and owe their life totally to the Creator. As such, true life springs from their participation in the life of God and communion with Him. Now it is the task of the incarnation of the Son to help us grow into the full realization of that image. The way that Jesus lived gives us insight as to how we must live in order to develop into the full expression of God’s image.

In a sermon that Gregory gave on Holy Saturday, he expounded on the motif of the divine incarnation by saying that God’s Son became man to show to what heights He would raise us; to keep us from self-exaltation through thinking that we ourselves are deserving of this position through our own merits; to join together, with His help, the sundered aspects of our nature.

This was made possible by virtue of the joining of the divine and human in the person of Jesus, the Christ (i.e., by the hypostatic union – the philosophical-theological explanation of how God could have accomplished joining the divine and human in the Person of  Jesus). When the Second Person of the Trinity took on human nature, He bestowed on it the fullness of His grace and delivered it from the bonds of   corruption and death. The consequence of this union of the two natures in Christ was the deification of human nature. Gregory’s view is sometimes called in the East the physical view since it derives the deification of human nature from its  hypostatic union with the incarnate Son of God.

God’s incarnation made Theosis possible!